In 1621 pressure from Plymouth Company's financiers impelled the colonists to ship to England a load of their commodities upon the vessel Fortune “laden with good clapboard as full as she could stowe.” However, it wasn't long before the pilgrims realized that their wood supply was too precious a resource to export, and promptly restricted overseas sales in a colony-wide decree: The event would be remembered as the Starving Time, and it would be another eleven years before timber production of any consequence would resume in New England. During the winter of 1609, 154 of the original 214 colonists perished. A letter written in 1608 expressing the abundant discovery of good trees for export read, “I heare not of any novelties or other commodities she hath brought more then sweet woode.” However, exportation of any scale was delayed. Īlmost immediately the London Company began sending shipments of trees back to England. On April 10, they entered the “Chesupioc” Bay and landed alongside “faire meddowes and goodly tall trees.” Finally on April 26, 1607, the London Company reached Virginia, and declared their settlement Jamestown in honor of the King. On Decemone hundred men and four boys boarded the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery and set sail down the Thames under Captain Christopher Newport. The charter decreed the right upon both companies to “make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia” between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of north latitude. The charter split the company into two separate groups, a London-based group known as the London Company (of which Hakluyt was a member) and a Plymouth-based group known as the Plymouth Company. Hakluyt and seven other men formed a joint stock company aptly named the Virginia Company, and on Apreceived the First Charter of Virginia from King James I. Hakluyt projected that an established lumber industry would deliver returns that would in itself justify investment in settling the area that was becoming commonly known by several names including Norumbega, Acadia, Virginia or New England. It was Hakluyt's belief that North America and its endless stock of resources would solve the nation's dilemma. Among the commodities listed as marketable goods was trees. In 1584 Richard Hakluyt, archdeacon of London's Westminster Abbey and preeminent geographer in Europe, published a manuscript titled A Discourse of Western Planting, in which he advocated the colonization of North America for the “employmente of numbers of idle men” to extract its natural resources for exportation to England. As a result, the price of firewood doubled between 15, leaving the poorest literally freezing to death. However, the seventeenth century even the tracts that had been reserved for the Crown had been depleted. In an attempt to preserve its dwindling resource, parliament passed Act for the Preservation of Woods in 1543, limiting further felling of timber to 440 yards from landed property. Beginning in the 1540s, further exploitation of its remaining forests ensued as British factories began consuming vast amounts of wood to fuel its iron industry. The English forests of hardwood and conifer had been all but decimated by the thirteenth century. By 1830, Bangor, Maine had become the world's largest lumber shipping port and would move over 8.7 billion board feet of timber over the following sixty two years. In this pursuit, hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples were displaced, murdered, and enslaved for the purpose of the timber industry.īy the 1790s, New England was exporting 36 million feet of pine boards and 300 ship masts annually, with over 75 percent coming from Massachusetts (which included Maine) and another 20 percent coming from New Hampshire. The industry expanded rapidly as Americans logged their way across the country. The easily available timber proved an incredible resource to early settlers, with both domestic consumption and overseas trade fueling demand. Following the near eradication of domestic timber on the British Isles, the abundance of old-growth forests in the New World posed an attractive alternative to importing choice timber from the Baltic via the narrow straits and channels between Denmark and Sweden. The history of the lumber industry in the united states spans from the precolonial period of British timber speculation, subsequent British colonization, and American development into the twenty-first century.
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